HISTORY AND HOPE OF HOMEOPATHY The Search for Meaning in Health and Illness By Douglas Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom(NA)
[published in New Connexion, Portlandís Alternative Monthly Newspaper. Also published online at www.newconnexion.net. September 2002 (Part 1), November 2002 (Part 2)] It's 1849, and a cholera epidemic is sweeping through Cincinnati. The morgues are filling up faster than people can be buried. 45 to 60% of patients admitted to the allopathic medical hospitals die. Yet in the homeopathic hospitals, only 3% of cholera patients die.
It was the glory days of homeopathy. Historian Harris Coulter reports
that by 1892 "homeopaths controlled about 110 hospitals, 145 dispensaries,
62 orphan asylums and old peoples' homes, over thirty nursing homes
and sanatoria, and 16 insane asylums." Communities and state governments
regarded homeopathy highly. In 1870 the New York State Legislature
appropriated $150,000 toward the construction of a homeopathic psychiatric
hospital, and the New York Ophthalmic Hospital, one of the largest
and best-endowed eye and ear hospitals in the country, passed into
homeopathic hands. After the Westborough Massachusetts Insane Asylum
was transferred to homeopathic control the Springfield Republican
devoted an admiring column in praise, reporting that "the cost of
maintenance is much less, and the recoveries and general success greater
than in allopathic asylums."
80 years later homeopathy was barely alive in the U.S. The homeopathic medical schools had locked their doors or become allopathic institutions. The homeopathic hospitals were forgotten. A tiny band of heroic elder homeopaths continued to practice, but few younger practitioners were available to take their places. Meanwhile, allopathic medicine had abandoned mercury poisoning and blood-letting, discovered the power of antibiotics, anesthesia, x-rays and steroids, thereby developing a credible diagnostic and therapeutic armamentarium with which to combat disease. The medico-industrial complex was rapidly developing into a powerful financial, ideological, and political empire.
Much has been written about the conspiracy of the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical companies to destroy homeopathic practice. But it is now generally recognized that while these powerful economic interests contributed to the near demise of homeopathy, other factors may have been at least as important. One is the relationship of its underlying assumptions to the zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. For no one makes decisions about health care in a social and ideological vacuum: the model of health care we select is intimately tied to our deepest beliefs about what causes illness, and what constitutes health.
Homeopathy was "born" as the 18th century expired, as industrialization was spreading like wildfire across Europe and North America. Its principles of using "like to cure like", non-material dosing, and careful individualization of prescriptions had more in common with medieval alchemy than modern ideas of mass production, the germ theory of disease, efficiency, reductionism, and classification. Expert homeopathic practitioners witnessed daily seemingly miraculous cures with remedies that had no substance and were considered spiritual in nature, reinforcing their deeply-held religious views of the world. The world, on the other hand, became increasingly enamored with its power to control material forces with technology and rational, causal thinking.
Fast forward to the present: It is the dawn of the new millennium. There is a rebirth of interest in spiritual matters, along with growing disillusionment, malaise and alienation produced by the one-sided emphasis on growth, technology, and exploitation of the earth. Homeopathy, along with many other once-suppressed healing techniques, is enjoying a resurgence of popularity.
Growth presents an opportunity as well as a challenge: How do we explain what we do? How do we relate to today's zeitgeist, to peoples' need to understand their health in the context of today's deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things? For all of its newfound popularity, homeopathy retains an antiquated, dated image. 'Little placebo sugar pellets for running noses' was my first thought when it was suggested that I take my then two year old child to a homeopath for an ear infection that didn't respond to the antibiotics I prescribed. It was only after I experienced, through my son's miraculous homeopathic recovery, the power of homeopathy that I began to investigate it seriously.
Most of my patients come to me after they've exhausted all other options. They've been to the specialists, and they've taken the drugs. They've had lots of tests but little relief. People with fatigue, pain, anxiety, irritable bowel, depression, allergies, confusion and memory loss, unexplained symptoms often find dramatic relief where no other previous treatment could help. Why didn't they come sooner? Because first and foremost people want to understand what's going on with them. The promise of a diagnosis is a promise of meaning, of making sense of what they are experiencing. And modern medicine promises just that: a diagnosis, a categorization, and an explanation.
Homeopathy promises a cure: it doesn't promise an explanation. This is both its strength and its weakness. In the following case I'd like to suggest that homeopathy can begin to offer an explanation, if we re-learn some basic assumptions about what constitutes health and illness.
A 10 year old girl — let's call her Cindy — was brought to me by her parents. In addition to eye pain, dizziness, insomnia, and other symptoms, she developed a number of compulsive behaviors, including odd rolling movements of her eyes. Her parents were concerned about the possibility of depression, as after a difficult encounter at school she became extremely upset and said she wanted to kill herself.
An ophthalmologist had diagnosed hysteria. A conventional psychiatric evaluation may well have diagnosed depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and stressed a family history of suicide and depression. Each diagnosis implicitly invokes a model of what is wrong: in the former case, a somatic expression of intra-psychic conflict; in the latter, a biological inheritance of an imbalance of neuro-transmitters in the brain.
Cindy's distress was upsetting the entire family, and the parents wanted, understandably, to understand their daughter's difficulties, some way of explaining it. Yet neither promised a satisfactory cure. How could homeopathy help?
After talking with Cindy at length, I learned that although she loved to read, she "loathed" writing. Curious, I asked her to tell me more about that. It seems that even though she was at a Montessori School, which is famous for respecting the individuality of learning styles, she had felt her creativity stymied. "They were crushing my imagination." Her suicidal despair at school occurred after her teacher insisted she keep her writing to the assigned topic. Eye-rolling, saliva-swishing, and other odd, automatic type of behaviors occurred mostly when she felt forced to give up individual, creative expression for the sake of the class.
"What exactly do you feel like", I pressed Cindy, "when you're forced to abandon your creative expression?" After thinking a little, she suddenly responded with an image: "Like a parrot in a cage!"
What a fascinating metaphor, I thought. A parrot, after all, is the embodiment of creativity denied. In spite of all its color, it cannot voice anything original, but simply "parrots" back what it is told. I researched what was known about the homeopathic remedy made from parrot feather, known as Macaw. It turns out that this remedy has proven curative in cases where the deepest conflict was between the sense of self and the need for expression, and that these issues came to the surface when the remedy was "proven". [Thanks to Jonathan Shore for his ground-breaking work on bird remedies].
Other aspects of Cindy also pointed towards the remedy Macaw, namely dreams of tropical places, a deep love for animals, a refined and spiritual sensitivity, and dreams of many colors. After two better-known remedies that seemed indicated by repertorization of symptoms failed to act (Lauroceraseus, Veratrum album), I prescribed a single dose of Macaw.
The results have been dramatic. Two weeks after the dose she announced that she was "considering giving up her aversion to writing". Three months later, her mother reported that her daughter is full of joy, and that "she now identifies herself as a writer!". The eye rolling and other compulsive behaviors have completely stopped. In addition, Cindy no longer is oppositional and difficult about studies, or about getting along with her brother. Cindy reported with joy that she was given a writing journal as a present, "since I was writing so many things they thought I should have a place to write things down".
Cindy's cure defies all conventional understandings about health and disease. The remedy, after all, had no thing in it. A portion of parrot feather was ground up with milk sugar and repeatedly diluted and agitated to the point where not a single molecule of the substance remained. It is clear to me, to the patient, and to her parents, that taking the remedy completely changed the course of Cindy's life, where two previous remedies had no lasting positive effect. So what happened?
The cure came when there occurred a resonance between the remedy and the way in which a patient is wounded and unable to heal....where, in a sense, the energy is bound up. Remedies are not medicines in a pharmacological sense; they are informational rather than material. Remedies are aspects of consciousness. Macaw, at essence, turns out to be the consciousness of the dilemma, or polarity, between free expression versus group identification (there are other subtle and varied manifestations of Macaw essence that are also expressed in individuals who may become sick when in a Macaw state).
Cindy's compulsive behaviors, her loathing of writing, her eye pain, her suicidal despair, were all symptoms of a single, unified state: the Macaw state. When the remedy cured one symptom, all the symptoms were ultimately cured. Symptoms are not isolated manifestations of biochemical or genetic derangements (although certainly these derangements participate in the expression of symptoms). Rather they are expressions of a state of being which has imposed and imprinted itself upon the soul, psyche, and soma of the embodied human spirit. Homeopathy works when the remedy given is similar to the state of the patient. When the remedy matches the patient, a dynamic healing process is set into motion. When the remedy doesn't match, deep and lasting healing does not occur, even if the patient finds the encounter with the homeopath therapeutic.
How can homeopathy explain itself to patients trying to understand themselves and their symptoms? Psychiatry and medicine offer diagnoses that give people the opportunity to see themselves as members of a group similarly afflicted with a disease which exists apart from them, and therefore helps to take away the responsibility for the illness. Good homeopathy, on the other hand, insists upon probing gently into the core of the problem. Instead of categorizing a person based on what symptoms are found in common with established, defined, diseases, it seeks to perceive what is unique about the patient. It asks: "What trouble stirs at the core, in the depths of the soul?" Instead of offering medication to suppress symptoms in the name of disease management, it seeks to stimulate a cure by offering a remedy which will resonate with the deepest dilemma of the patient.
We live in a time when a mechanical conception of health and disease still holds sway over much of our thinking. We talk about our parts wearing out, getting a "tune up", and look for a material, genetic basis for faulty metabolic pathways. Yet homeopathy offers a window into a far more complex, subtle, and fascinating reality. That reality relates to consciousness, and promises a radical re-appraisal of the relationship of our subjective realities to our physical well-being. For those of us who seek to understand the meaning of our symptoms and the message of our illnesses, homeopathy offers a vision grander than any other system of healing.
Doug Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom is a graduate of Yale University School
of Nursing and the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy. He became a homeopath
when after 11 years of working with conventional medicine as a Family
Nurse Practitioner he remained dissatisfied with its failure to cure
chronic disease and with its fragmentation of care. He treats children
and adults in Portland, OR, and Walla Walla, WA, and can be reached
at (503) 253-6334, or by email at remedyman@comcast.net.
